Quotes

Contributors

Fractal Vizion’s Performing Arts

For those of you who don’t know… there’s a lot of fractal programs out there!

One the most unique is Terry Gintz’s Fractal Vizion. In fact, I’m not sure whether it was intended to be a straightforward fractal generator or some sort of desktop electronic performing arts revue. The program just seems to work differently than any other fractal program I’ve used. Behind every button on the Fractal Vizion Remote Controller is a different performer and always, a fresh, randomly created performance. The ways in which it actually works –not just the images that it makes– are fun to watch. It’s a performance.

Now that I’ve acquired video screenshot powers I can bring these Fractal Vizion Performances to a wider audience. I’m sure that not everyone familiar with fractal art is familiar with Fractal Vizion. Ladies and Gentlemen: Everything is authentic. Nothing has been “faked”. Try the program out for yourselves and see that you too can turn your desktop computer into a three-ring circus. Or rather, a nine-ring circus.

I’ve captured the two most interesting performers here. L-Systems and Fractal Landscapes. There’s a bunch of others that also put on a performance at the push of a button.

L-Systems are not the usual sort of thing one expects to find in a fractal program. But Terry Gintz has a flair for making programs with a much wider repertoire of computational powers than most developers would even attempt. Watch how the L-System creator works: first it draws a colored wireframe and finally it renders the finished L-system. The process and the final product are equally interesting. Most programs are not this interesting to watch while they’re rendering. It’s like watching an artist work. See for yourself…

I love these Fractal Landscapes. Every one seems to suggest a different opening scene from an old Sword and Sandal movie, a sub-genre of movies, largely Italian made from the 50s and 60s, that dealt with themes from the history and legends of the Greek and Roman classical world.

There’s probably many ways to render these sorts of images but the style that FV uses is a good example of the program’s author expressing his own artistry and artistic style. Perhaps I’m the only one obsessed with looking at these landscapes, but the slow, multicolored way they’re drawn, as if some magical curtain was being slowly pulled aside, or some ominous shadow was moving across the land and bringing forms into being, makes the final products of this process only part of the show.

Well, I hope you enjoyed the show(s). Even if you never try out the program for yourself, you’ve at least seen a little bit of the vast and varied machinery of fractal programming. Sometimes fractal art is just a program. The program draws something and then it draws something else. All you keep is the memory of what you’ve seen and the wonder.

Fractal ViZion is definitely an easy to use application for exploring various fractal related imagery. And with all of those Random choices on the Remote: Julias, Newtons, Quaternions, Orbitals, Height Fields, and several more, it gives the average non-mathematician a place to start.

But for those more adventurous individuals, they can open up the fractal variables (FVR) dialog to edit many of the parameters and functions used to create an image.